32 CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 BEN COWELL Heritage management plans and historic landscapes A heritage management plan is an essential tool in managing an historically significant landscape, defining the relationship to the house and detailing public access. Historic Houses (the modern brand identity for the Historic Houses Association, or HHA) is celebrating its half-centenary throughout 2024. The association was founded in 1973 as a pressure group to raise awareness of the threats facing privately owned historic houses and their landscapes. From the outset, the HHA was as interested in the protection of historic landscapes as it was in the conservation of buildings. The organisation’s constitution defined it as being ‘an association of owners and guardians of historic houses, parks and gardens and places of historic interest in the United Kingdom’. Arguably, the association should have been named the Historic Houses, Parks and Gardens Association, but, in the end, any reference to landscapes was omitted from the title. By way of making amends, the association established a Gardens Committee in 1976 to discuss concerns relating to the wider landscapes within which houses sat. The first chair of this committee was Lawrence Banks, the owner of Hergest Croft in Herefordshire and a future treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). His wife, Elizabeth, a landscape designer by profession, would go on to become the first woman to be president of the RHS. The early HHA was keen to emphasise that the heritage it was seeking to preserve was to be found in the ensemble of a building, its collection and its wider landscape, and not any one of these elements in isolation. In some ways the threats facing historic house landscapes in the 1970s were just as significant as those facing the buildings, if not more so. It was no coincidence, therefore, that the famous V&A exhibition of 1974, The Destruction of the Country House, was followed five years later by another blockbuster V&A show, The Garden: a celebration of 1,000 years of British gardening. Threats to these cherished landscapes might come from transport infrastructure, as when the M25 was proposed to slice through the parkland surrounding Copped Hall in Essex, or when a motorway spur threatened the Euston Hall, Suffolk, built in the 1660s around the core of an earlier house, was remodelled in the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. As with the other places pictured, the house and landscape are held under a conditional exemption agreement.
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